Pesticide resistance happens naturally, how about we help bees become resistant to pesticides by GMO-ing them? (And do this multiple times in multiple ways with diverse bee genotypes, so that we aren't producing a bee monoculture.)
Or at least breeding them for that? Rapidly develop pesticide resistant honeybees? And while we are at it, why not help them become resistant to mites/viruses?
I *like* eating. We need bees, why not help them out?
And your point is quite correct. 50% of the time I have run restore drills, I have turned up a failure in the restore process which got fixed.
What I do is "delete" something on a random basis, wait for the easy recovery options to time out, then ask for a restoration of something that has definitely had to go to tape.
Won't that do something to air quality in general? And wouldn't sulfates lead to acid rain? How bad will the acid rain get? Is this going to mess with ocean chemistry even more?
Right now, someone who has your information but no real proof of identity can borrow money as "you", and the creditor gets to libel you via the credit reporting agencies when they don't get paid.
This must stop. Please write Congress and demand that creditors no longer have the right to libel you as a non-payer unless they can prove it was actually YOU who borrowed their money and failed to repay as promised instead of just someone who had some information about you, that they didn't bother doing due diligence on to verify.
I've already written Congress about this several times, but now it's literally EVERYONE'S information that has been stolen, and the whole nation must face the fact that they are vulnerable to this sort of thing now.
You say "not planning to prevent it would be foolhardy in the extreme".
Prevention may simply be impossible or cost prohibitive. It may already be too late to draw off the heat driving an eruption. It could be the right thing to do to deal with the Yellowstone disaster is to manage world population, migrate people away from the danger site, set up shelters with food caches, and wait out the environmental damage to the point where it makes sense to emerge and reconstruct. That may well be the necessary approach.
I like the idea of defusing the Yellowstone supervolcano by drawing the heat off and putting it to use powering North America. However, it's far from evident that it can work, or that the cost of making it work would be favorable compared to the 'shelter and deal' option.
Interesting estimate, but you're missing a key idea or two.
How fast is energy coming in? You need to pull energy out at that rate or faster to keep temperature static or cooling. What's that power level? W, not Wh. You don't need to cool all that rock, you just have to keep it from heating it up more to the point where it blows.
Well, and even this might be oversimplified. At issue might be where the heat is. If you cool enough at the surface so that the rock is strong enough to keep the stuff below contained, the artificially "cold cap" may keep the hotter stuff tamped indefinitely. It may be that the failure mechanism is that the surface eventually heats up and becomes weak, releasing what is below. If the surface rock is cooled artificially quickly, it may be much more effective at keeping the hot stuff below contained, and that heat may dissipate more broadly and non-destructively indefinitely.
Maybe. So the actual scale of an effective project might be far lower than your numbers seem to indicate, I simply don't know, I doubt anyone knows right now.
What's more, the cost equation may be more favorable than you think. Remember the power extracted has value, possibly justifying hundreds of billions or trillions of investment especially when balanced against worldwide destruction as a consequence. Again, not known.
and other articles. Why is the FDA not jumping on this treatment and allowing it in the USA? Is it because we can't give credit to the results of other first world countries' studies? If so, this is dumb as rocks.
Treatments exist today that could relieve as much as 90% of the severe peanut allergy burden in this country.
No way am I going to sign up for Disney's streaming service. There are too many streaming services already and I'm going to stick with the successful ones that have the broadest offerings.
If I were Disney, I would be pushing for a fair revenue sharing deal. Push Netflix to share out their revenue to the content providers according to the fraction of time watched, and push Netflix to provide transparency so this can be audited. Netflix, in turn, should charge a reasonable delivery/infrastructure fee, and share out the revenue for content "blind" to where the content comes from. I.e., if their own content generation produces 30% of the viewing, their own content generation division gets 30% of the content revenue.
With a species like mosquito, I wonder if you can really contain a gene drive.
If you use it to wipe out a local population, well, if some individuals with the gene drive make it out of that local population back to the "main" population, the main population is going to see dominance of that gene as well.
Because of this, I would rather see gene drive used like this, where possible: instead of wiping out the local population of Anopheles mosquito, you drive a gene that makes that mosquito incapable of carrying disease. Then, in 20 or so generations, you have a population that is incapable of carrying disease but is otherwise fine. If your gene drive escapes its intended bounds, well, the worldwide population is incapable of carrying that disease and that disease is eradicated.
It does this by copying itself to new chromosomes whenever it can, thus, when sexual reproduction occurs, BOTH sets of chromosomes (or some high fraction) passed onto the next generation carries the gene, not just ONE.
Every (or most) mosquito descended from one with this gene will give this gene to EVERY (most) mosquito generated from it instead of 1/2. This is FAR different from standard sexual reproduction (1/2). Model this interaction mathematically (and refer to my link) and you will see that within about 20 generations, 100% of the targeted population will carry the gene. And that will be the last generation. (Yes, there are some caveats, such as a male carrying this gene has to be as (or nearly as ) reproductively fit as a male that does not.
Right, I got the Hep B immunization too, but in retrospect, like the Hep A immunization, my risk is so low I don't think I really needed it. Non-standard for me, but one I took anyway, was the chickenpox immunization. I think I could use a booster now. I am also considering taking one of the pneumonia vaccines.
Re: rabies: 1-2 rabies deaths per year in the USA. Lightning: 50-ish deaths per year. That's a low enough risk I won't bother with the shot. And have you heard of the girl who survived rabies by means of being put into a coma? A person need not suffer horribly due to rabies anymore. They can put you out and keep you out.
Smallpox: If smallpox is re-released upon the world, then I'll get the vaccination. Hopefully, if that happens, whomever unleashes that abomination upon the world will not have altered it sufficiently that the old vaccine is useless.
I'll add a remark: I will absolutely take a vaccination even if I am low risk of acquiring disease if it is part of a worldwide eradication effort. Like I'll gladly take a polio booster.
PS: I really, really support increased efforts in developing new vaccines for things like TB, malaria, zika, ebola.
PPS: The standard vaccinations (your term is better) are standard for good reason and the nonstandard aren't standard because the benefit is relatively low.
Unless you travel overseas a lot? You're simply not likely to encounter yellow fever.
Rabies is so rare that, unless you are a veterinarian or do certain types of health work, you're much more likely to get struck by lightning. You can get immunized successfully after exposure.
Smallpox has been eradicated.
I thought I was borderline crazy for getting immunized for Hep A, but wow, you take it a long way.
What everyone really needs though, are the old standards, especially pertussis. I know someone that died of pertussis, she was too young to be immunized.
Oh, and I think the tuberculosis vaccine is of limited use. Not very effective and makes screening for TB difficult.
It's becoming clear that we can't protect people from using deadly drugs stupidly.
Is this going to be the way that humanity self-selects to live or to die from the gene pool? Being so lousy at self control that we kill ourselves with deadly drugs of uncertain origin and potency?
Don't forget, weaponry and soldiers will be automated too. The power of the masses to rise up and defeat the political establishment by violence is either already in the past, or soon will be.
The problem with short-hour workers is that there is more overhead in maintaining more people and keeping them on task. Payroll/management/benefits are all easier with 4 40 hour workers than with 8 20 hour workers.
So the 1% won't go for having more workers, because of inefficiency. The 1% also won't like paying their workers 2x as much per hour. And the 1% controls the political process.
What's more, as large parts of the labor force are put out of work, even the educated worker will find his skills devalued, unless those who control resources start demanding a lot more creative work.
It's pure market forces: if there are fewer jobs out there, more people will bid on the work, driving prices down.
Already, despite huge increases in productivity per hour, the worker is paid 50% of the share of corporate productivity that the worker got in 1973. If labor had the same fraction as in 1973, labor would have 2x the purchasing power per hour worked.
The screwing of labor has started, is already severe, and it is going to get worse.
If your asset is attached to the network, literally billions of people could potentially attack it, from anywhere on the world. Not only that, but they can unleash automated attacks upon your asset from other Internet targets they've previously compromised.
If your asset is on its own network, or is non-networked, that cuts down on the number of possible attackers tremendously.
So, critical infrastructure should NOT be on the Internet, or at least not without a correspondingly LARGE investment in security commensurate to the risk.
There's a large difference between a vulnerability that requires someone to be physically present to exploit it (graffiti on a wall) and a vulnerability that potentially anyone on the planet with an internet connection can exploit--or a radio.
I actually agree with you, it's often not cost-effective to secure things that require physical access to exploit. However, network-connected things have potentially billions of attackers.
Furthermore, the attacks can be automated, so that one person can attack millions of targets.
Anything connected to the Internet is at far more risk than anything that is not.
Humanity doesn't really have to support people who never contribute. (Most people will retire or whatever, and some will never be fit to work).
1) Shrink the work week. (I consider this nonviable because it is wasteful) We can shrink the "work week" to almost nothing. Then everyone needs to "work" at those few jobs which are still essential. You just divide up the work smaller and smaller. I think this is a stupid idea, because the overhead on learning the skills tends to infinity.
2) Employ everyone in jobs that can't be automated. This means people working in arts, and maybe the sciences (if that remains unautomated), eradicating the last of the diseases that still afflict humanity, etc. This means that the people who control resources will have to demand *far far* more arts and science than they currently do. Yet in an abundance society, there will be effectively more resources to demand creative output from people than there are people. Seems like no problem, it just takes willingness to put resources to use this way. This way, we can keep "work or die", but there *has* to be a commitment from those who control resources to *accept* whatever creative work can be done by the people that are alive. This is by far my preferred vision of human future, thanks Marshall Brain for the inspiration. It preserves motivation to continue creative work instead of allowing humanity to descend to total meaningless existence.
3) Provide handouts with no expectation of work. This *may* work out well, I don't think it's a proven fact that people won't do creative things without threat of starvation. I think some will be driven to create despite having all necessities handed to them.
Good outcome or bad depends only and solely on the greed of those who control resources. If they want to hog all the resources to themselves, far beyond their needs, then yes, it'll be a mass slaughter. If they want to allow humanity as a whole to use the available resources is some more equitable way, then it could end up as a paradise.
So you acknowledge that you're screwed and need the help?
Good. I'm sort of tired of the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Instead of helping just you, how about we help everyone who needs to work?
Like for example, pay labor the same fraction of corporate productivity that labor got in 1973? Everyone would get 2x the purchasing power. I think that'd help you a lot more than I personally could help you. It would also help me.
The OTHER factor that idled the factories for 3 months was lack of demand.
D'you think the market would have been "flooded" if laborers had 2x the purchasing power?
And 2x the purchasing power is *exactly* what labor would have if labor had the same share of corporate productivity that labor had in 1973.
Instead, GM would be looking to build more factories instead of idling their capacity.
"Virtuous cycle: productivity increases leads to more pay in wages which leads to more demand which leads to more investment in productivity increases."
Guess what got broken when the elite started hogging all the benefits of increased productivity up to the top?
You know what, you're right about ME. I've built up enough funds to be in the "owns things" class. I personally will be just FINE, unless of course, I get unlucky and some unanticipated medical expenses wipe me out. (This could easily happen to ANYONE who isn't independently wealthy.)
However, there are a LOT of people out there, mainly younger than me, who weren't born with wealth and who rely on their labor to have any sort of standard of living or future. Right now, many of these people are living paycheck to paycheck with no chance to get ahead right now. I know lots of these people. They are often more inherently talented than I was, and work just as hard or harder.
However, they don't have the same opportunities, in general, that I did. They had to pay more for school and are saddled with debt. Fewer jobs are available to them.
The "ownership class" isn't open to them because, without reward from labor, they can't bootstrap themselves into it.
And unlike a lot of people who have succeeded, I'm not willing to turn my back on those that come later and say, "I got mine. **** you."
What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.
Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.
Suppose all truck drivers are replaced with automation. That's 1M more people on the job market. Yes, maybe they can't do MY job, but, with no alternative, they'll try to get educated and move up the labor food chain.
And with more people in general chasing ever fewer jobs, there'll always be someone willing to do any given job for cheaper--including mine.
Arguably this has already happened significantly. Do you realize that the share of corporate productivity that goes to labor has shrunk in half compared to 1973?
That if labor got the same share of productivity today that it had in 1973, that we'd all have 2x the purchasing power? I'd love to be paid 2x the purchasing power. I'd be done with my mortgage, be completely unworried about retirement and paying for medical care, etc.
I welcome automation replacing labor, but we have to find a way to distribute the resulting wealth such that the people who own things have don't have ALL the wealth and so that the people who can no longer make ends meet in a depressed labor market can live decent lives.
You a troll? This guy didn't say "I got mine screw you". He served the community by taking a risk and getting himself and his kids vaccinated. That's the exact opposite of "got mine screw you".
What he's saying is, "I contributed to the public safety at some small risk to myself and mine, SCREW the people too selfish and cowardly to do the same!"
Slashdot Mirror
Pesticide resistance happens naturally, how about we help bees become resistant to pesticides by GMO-ing them? (And do this multiple times in multiple ways with diverse bee genotypes, so that we aren't producing a bee monoculture.)
Or at least breeding them for that? Rapidly develop pesticide resistant honeybees? And while we are at it, why not help them become resistant to mites/viruses?
I *like* eating. We need bees, why not help them out?
--PeterM
And your point is quite correct. 50% of the time I have run restore drills, I have turned up a failure in the restore process which got fixed.
What I do is "delete" something on a random basis, wait for the easy recovery options to time out, then ask for a restoration of something that has definitely had to go to tape.
--PeterM
Won't that do something to air quality in general? And wouldn't sulfates lead to acid rain? How bad will the acid rain get? Is this going to mess with ocean chemistry even more?
--PeterM
Right now, someone who has your information but no real proof of identity can borrow money as "you", and the creditor gets to libel you via the credit reporting agencies when they don't get paid.
This must stop. Please write Congress and demand that creditors no longer have the right to libel you as a non-payer unless they can prove it was actually YOU who borrowed their money and failed to repay as promised instead of just someone who had some information about you, that they didn't bother doing due diligence on to verify.
I've already written Congress about this several times, but now it's literally EVERYONE'S information that has been stolen, and the whole nation must face the fact that they are vulnerable to this sort of thing now.
--PeterM
You say "not planning to prevent it would be foolhardy in the extreme".
Prevention may simply be impossible or cost prohibitive. It may already be too late to draw off the heat driving an eruption. It could be the right thing to do to deal with the Yellowstone disaster is to manage world population, migrate people away from the danger site, set up shelters with food caches, and wait out the environmental damage to the point where it makes sense to emerge and reconstruct. That may well be the necessary approach.
I like the idea of defusing the Yellowstone supervolcano by drawing the heat off and putting it to use powering North America. However, it's far from evident that it can work, or that the cost of making it work would be favorable compared to the 'shelter and deal' option.
Interesting estimate, but you're missing a key idea or two.
How fast is energy coming in? You need to pull energy out at that rate or faster to keep temperature static or cooling. What's that power level? W, not Wh. You don't need to cool all that rock, you just have to keep it from heating it up more to the point where it blows.
Well, and even this might be oversimplified. At issue might be where the heat is. If you cool enough at the surface so that the rock is strong enough to keep the stuff below contained, the artificially "cold cap" may keep the hotter stuff tamped indefinitely. It may be that the failure mechanism is that the surface eventually heats up and becomes weak, releasing what is below. If the surface rock is cooled artificially quickly, it may be much more effective at keeping the hot stuff below contained, and that heat may dissipate more broadly and non-destructively indefinitely.
Maybe. So the actual scale of an effective project might be far lower than your numbers seem to indicate, I simply don't know, I doubt anyone knows right now.
What's more, the cost equation may be more favorable than you think. Remember the power extracted has value, possibly justifying hundreds of billions or trillions of investment especially when balanced against worldwide destruction as a consequence. Again, not known.
--PeterM
I agree arresting kids who had no ill intent with their food is overboard. Use of peanuts as a deadly weapon is quite another issue.
However, the British have > 90% effective treatments for desensitizing people with peanut allergies. Since 2009-ish.
https://blogs.scientificameric...
and other articles. Why is the FDA not jumping on this treatment and allowing it in the USA? Is it because we can't give credit to the results of other first world countries' studies? If so, this is dumb as rocks.
Treatments exist today that could relieve as much as 90% of the severe peanut allergy burden in this country.
--PeterM
No way am I going to sign up for Disney's streaming service. There are too many streaming services already and I'm going to stick with the successful ones that have the broadest offerings.
If I were Disney, I would be pushing for a fair revenue sharing deal. Push Netflix to share out their revenue to the content providers according to the fraction of time watched, and push Netflix to provide transparency so this can be audited. Netflix, in turn, should charge a reasonable delivery/infrastructure fee, and share out the revenue for content "blind" to where the content comes from. I.e., if their own content generation produces 30% of the viewing, their own content generation division gets 30% of the content revenue.
--PeterM
With a species like mosquito, I wonder if you can really contain a gene drive.
If you use it to wipe out a local population, well, if some individuals with the gene drive make it out of that local population back to the "main" population, the main population is going to see dominance of that gene as well.
Because of this, I would rather see gene drive used like this, where possible: instead of wiping out the local population of Anopheles mosquito, you drive a gene that makes that mosquito incapable of carrying disease. Then, in 20 or so generations, you have a population that is incapable of carrying disease but is otherwise fine. If your gene drive escapes its intended bounds, well, the worldwide population is incapable of carrying that disease and that disease is eradicated.
--PeterM
You're entirely wrong about the necessity of catching every (or a significant fraction) of an entire generation of mosquito.
That is the entire point of the gene drive: it "drives" its genes throughout the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It does this by copying itself to new chromosomes whenever it can, thus, when sexual reproduction occurs, BOTH sets of chromosomes (or some high fraction) passed onto the next generation carries the gene, not just ONE.
Every (or most) mosquito descended from one with this gene will give this gene to EVERY (most) mosquito generated from it instead of 1/2. This is FAR different from standard sexual reproduction (1/2). Model this interaction mathematically (and refer to my link) and you will see that within about 20 generations, 100% of the targeted population will carry the gene. And that will be the last generation. (Yes, there are some caveats, such as a male carrying this gene has to be as (or nearly as ) reproductively fit as a male that does not.
--PeterM
--PeterM
Right, I got the Hep B immunization too, but in retrospect, like the Hep A immunization, my risk is so low I don't think I really needed it. Non-standard for me, but one I took anyway, was the chickenpox immunization. I think I could use a booster now. I am also considering taking one of the pneumonia vaccines.
Re: rabies: 1-2 rabies deaths per year in the USA. Lightning: 50-ish deaths per year. That's a low enough risk I won't bother with the shot. And have you heard of the girl who survived rabies by means of being put into a coma? A person need not suffer horribly due to rabies anymore. They can put you out and keep you out.
Smallpox: If smallpox is re-released upon the world, then I'll get the vaccination. Hopefully, if that happens, whomever unleashes that abomination upon the world will not have altered it sufficiently that the old vaccine is useless.
I'll add a remark: I will absolutely take a vaccination even if I am low risk of acquiring disease if it is part of a worldwide eradication effort. Like I'll gladly take a polio booster.
PS: I really, really support increased efforts in developing new vaccines for things like TB, malaria, zika, ebola.
PPS: The standard vaccinations (your term is better) are standard for good reason and the nonstandard aren't standard because the benefit is relatively low.
Unless you travel overseas a lot? You're simply not likely to encounter yellow fever.
Rabies is so rare that, unless you are a veterinarian or do certain types of health work, you're much more likely to get struck by lightning. You can get immunized successfully after exposure.
Smallpox has been eradicated.
I thought I was borderline crazy for getting immunized for Hep A, but wow, you take it a long way.
What everyone really needs though, are the old standards, especially pertussis. I know someone that died of pertussis, she was too young to be immunized.
Oh, and I think the tuberculosis vaccine is of limited use. Not very effective and makes screening for TB difficult.
--PeterM
It's becoming clear that we can't protect people from using deadly drugs stupidly.
Is this going to be the way that humanity self-selects to live or to die from the gene pool? Being so lousy at self control that we kill ourselves with deadly drugs of uncertain origin and potency?
--PM
Don't forget, weaponry and soldiers will be automated too. The power of the masses to rise up and defeat the political establishment by violence is either already in the past, or soon will be.
--PM
The problem with short-hour workers is that there is more overhead in maintaining more people and keeping them on task. Payroll/management/benefits are all easier with 4 40 hour workers than with 8 20 hour workers.
So the 1% won't go for having more workers, because of inefficiency. The 1% also won't like paying their workers 2x as much per hour. And the 1% controls the political process.
--PM
What's more, as large parts of the labor force are put out of work, even the educated worker will find his skills devalued, unless those who control resources start demanding a lot more creative work.
It's pure market forces: if there are fewer jobs out there, more people will bid on the work, driving prices down.
Already, despite huge increases in productivity per hour, the worker is paid 50% of the share of corporate productivity that the worker got in 1973. If labor had the same fraction as in 1973, labor would have 2x the purchasing power per hour worked.
The screwing of labor has started, is already severe, and it is going to get worse.
--PeterM
If your asset is attached to the network, literally billions of people could potentially attack it, from anywhere on the world. Not only that, but they can unleash automated attacks upon your asset from other Internet targets they've previously compromised.
If your asset is on its own network, or is non-networked, that cuts down on the number of possible attackers tremendously.
So, critical infrastructure should NOT be on the Internet, or at least not without a correspondingly LARGE investment in security commensurate to the risk.
--PeterM
There's a large difference between a vulnerability that requires someone to be physically present to exploit it (graffiti on a wall) and a vulnerability that potentially anyone on the planet with an internet connection can exploit--or a radio.
I actually agree with you, it's often not cost-effective to secure things that require physical access to exploit. However, network-connected things have potentially billions of attackers.
Furthermore, the attacks can be automated, so that one person can attack millions of targets.
Anything connected to the Internet is at far more risk than anything that is not.
--PM
Humanity doesn't really have to support people who never contribute. (Most people will retire or whatever, and some will never be fit to work).
1) Shrink the work week. (I consider this nonviable because it is wasteful)
We can shrink the "work week" to almost nothing. Then everyone needs to "work" at those few jobs which are still essential. You just divide up the work smaller and smaller. I think this is a stupid idea, because the overhead on learning the skills tends to infinity.
2) Employ everyone in jobs that can't be automated. This means people working in arts, and maybe the sciences (if that remains unautomated), eradicating the last of the diseases that still afflict humanity, etc. This means that the people who control resources will have to demand *far far* more arts and science than they currently do. Yet in an abundance society, there will be effectively more resources to demand creative output from people than there are people. Seems like no problem, it just takes willingness to put resources to use this way. This way, we can keep "work or die", but there *has* to be a commitment from those who control resources to *accept* whatever creative work can be done by the people that are alive. This is by far my preferred vision of human future, thanks Marshall Brain for the inspiration. It preserves motivation to continue creative work instead of allowing humanity to descend to total meaningless existence.
3) Provide handouts with no expectation of work. This *may* work out well, I don't think it's a proven fact that people won't do creative things without threat of starvation. I think some will be driven to create despite having all necessities handed to them.
Good outcome or bad depends only and solely on the greed of those who control resources. If they want to hog all the resources to themselves, far beyond their needs, then yes, it'll be a mass slaughter. If they want to allow humanity as a whole to use the available resources is some more equitable way, then it could end up as a paradise.
--PeterM
So you acknowledge that you're screwed and need the help?
Good. I'm sort of tired of the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Instead of helping just you, how about we help everyone who needs to work?
Like for example, pay labor the same fraction of corporate productivity that labor got in 1973? Everyone would get 2x the purchasing power. I think that'd help you a lot more than I personally could help you. It would also help me.
--PM
The OTHER factor that idled the factories for 3 months was lack of demand.
D'you think the market would have been "flooded" if laborers had 2x the purchasing power?
And 2x the purchasing power is *exactly* what labor would have if labor had the same share of corporate productivity that labor had in 1973.
Instead, GM would be looking to build more factories instead of idling their capacity.
"Virtuous cycle: productivity increases leads to more pay in wages which leads to more demand which leads to more investment in productivity increases."
Guess what got broken when the elite started hogging all the benefits of increased productivity up to the top?
--PeterM
You know what, you're right about ME. I've built up enough funds to be in the "owns things" class. I personally will be just FINE, unless of course, I get unlucky and some unanticipated medical expenses wipe me out. (This could easily happen to ANYONE who isn't independently wealthy.)
However, there are a LOT of people out there, mainly younger than me, who weren't born with wealth and who rely on their labor to have any sort of standard of living or future. Right now, many of these people are living paycheck to paycheck with no chance to get ahead right now. I know lots of these people. They are often more inherently talented than I was, and work just as hard or harder.
However, they don't have the same opportunities, in general, that I did. They had to pay more for school and are saddled with debt. Fewer jobs are available to them.
The "ownership class" isn't open to them because, without reward from labor, they can't bootstrap themselves into it.
And unlike a lot of people who have succeeded, I'm not willing to turn my back on those that come later and say, "I got mine. **** you."
--PeterM
What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.
Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.
Suppose all truck drivers are replaced with automation. That's 1M more people on the job market. Yes, maybe they can't do MY job, but, with no alternative, they'll try to get educated and move up the labor food chain.
And with more people in general chasing ever fewer jobs, there'll always be someone willing to do any given job for cheaper--including mine.
Arguably this has already happened significantly. Do you realize that the share of corporate productivity that goes to labor has shrunk in half compared to 1973?
That if labor got the same share of productivity today that it had in 1973, that we'd all have 2x the purchasing power? I'd love to be paid 2x the purchasing power. I'd be done with my mortgage, be completely unworried about retirement and paying for medical care, etc.
I welcome automation replacing labor, but we have to find a way to distribute the resulting wealth such that the people who own things have don't have ALL the wealth and so that the people who can no longer make ends meet in a depressed labor market can live decent lives.
--PeterM
Methyl mercury is very toxic.
Vaccines used thimerosal as a preservative, thimerosal is a different mercury compound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What's more, your "correction" to the previous person was for something he didn't say.
You a troll? This guy didn't say "I got mine screw you". He served the community by taking a risk and getting himself and his kids vaccinated. That's the exact opposite of "got mine screw you".
What he's saying is, "I contributed to the public safety at some small risk to myself and mine, SCREW the people too selfish and cowardly to do the same!"